Posts Tagged ‘sam pink’

Hey, does anybody remember when Sam Pink did the ‘other people’ podcast where the interviewer asked a series of really vapid questions and made each answer about himself by ‘relating’ with an anecdotal story even though his anecdots were less interesting than the lumber aisle at home depot.

Then, after an extended period of extreme awkwardness, asked the most undignified, shameless question ever to be asked in any interview: ‘do you like me?’

Wasn’t that, like, totes, the most hilarious/fucking tragically pathetic moment in the last 5 years of human interaction or what.

7. “I decided then to only ever encourage people, no matter what they wanted to do. To get through life by saying yes to everything, so no one could say I didn’t get what I wanted, and also so nobody would dislike me.”

8. Most everything he says is deflective in this way.

9. The reader does, I think, get a glimpse of the narrator when he shares his thoughts every now and then.

10. “Imagining myself enlarged, inhaling the smoke off a burning cop as he scream ‘no no no’ – unable to even touch his agonizing face because his skin’s so blistered.”

Sam Pink’s looking for a rich ‘big beautiful woman’ to take him to AWP — (“i’m a mobstaaaaah”)

DOG STORY

by Sam Pink

***

there’s this dog that lives a few blocks away from me. i always see him lying down in a fenced-in patio area out back. one time i saw a guy walking his dog by the fenced-in patio area and the guy stopped and stood there distracted–talking on his cellphone–as his dog pissed on the head of the dog lying down, who didn’t move.

***

i wrote this poem after rauan asked me if i had any poems. the main inspiration is a dog i saw getting pissed on, and also, rauan asking me for a poem.

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

1. Who are these people. I picture Gerald McClellan in a ring with Nigel Benn but maybe they’re just labels on a whiskey pint, they’re on the shelf next to each other like “Hey, we made it,” and maybe they have. Shelf life for life.

2. Sam’s Chicago doesn’t require much “game” or at least if you’re pretty for a white boy it kind of seems like the junkies are all thinking like a bunch of teenage girls.

3. I felt the distinct possibility of having teenage girls want to/pretend to want to fuck me to be alluring but not in a sexual way. All those big eyes with mascara and vodka and older brothers smaller than me. Everything would ride on those brothers being smaller than me, though. They’ve got retractable batons. My little brother once had a friend named Erin that I wanted to like me because she was going to art school in France according to my mom.

4. I worked in a warehouse once. So did I. The people in Sam’s warehouse seem like chillers. I want to throw a jammer with these chillers, and then they do. Same thing about the feeling in “Nice Job”. I would have never said “Nice Job” to anyone driving a forklift. Thought about it though.

5. Limited death types/options on pursuing boxing as a future.

6. Every story has a choice. Listing choices is easy. Spending the night outside of your girlfriend’s apartment because you have no other choice, even if you think the rats are sweet, is a hard choice to make. The movements of Sam’s characters feel both arbitrary and necessary, but always made by one person alone.

7. No matter what, the homeless will always have more friends than you.

Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading this week is an excerpt from Sam Pink‘s forthcoming novel, Rontel, which is coming Valentine’s Day 2013 in print form from Lazy Fascist Press (kudos to Cameron Pierce!), as well as in a digital edition via Electric Literature. EL has also posted an animation of one of the sentences:

I found the excerpt hilarious and enjoyable and good. Sam is one of my favorite authors. I assume a lot of people who come to this site already love Sam Pink or suck, but if you don’t know him, he is a very clever author, darkly comic with some other thing going on.

At The Faster Times, James Yeh provides an excellent & funny long gmail chat interview with former-Giant contributor, still-Giant-for-life Sam Pink on the occasion of his new novel PERSON from Lazy Fascist Press, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.